You all liked the last two, so I'm going to keep it going so long as I have ideas and time. This is another casual post in the spirit of what I wish someone had told me when I was younger.

Some people really hate small talk. I never really did. Mostly small talk just confused me or I barely registered the difference between small talk and big talk. So I never really cared about it one way or another.

Then I moved to the Bay Area and lived with a bunch of rationalists and found out some people really hate small talk.

I remember one time carpooling to a party. The party was in Palo Alto and we were driving down from Berkeley. As we started to cross the Dumbarton bridge we got on the topic salt flats^[1]. After a couple minutes one of my fellow passengers cried out:

enough of this small talk! i could have this conversation with anyone! we're all thoughtful, interesting people! surely we can talk about something more interesting!

And then sat in silence for a couple minutes trying to come up with a good enough topic of conversation.

The standard arguments against small talk go like this:

Small talk is too shallow. Only deeper conversations are worth having.
Small talk is boring. It doesn't convey new information.
Small talk is fake and full of bullshitting and hyperbole as people try to make themselves look good.
Small talk asks people to casually share too much about their personal lives.
Small talk demands people be constantly ready to say mildly interesting things.

People value different things, and I'm sure some people legit don't value small talk and there's no convincing them. But our values are also informed by our skills. Sometimes what we think is a deeply held value is actually just a defense mechanism because we aren't good at a skill. So in this case, opposing small talk is sometimes the result of:

being introverted and overloaded and not wanting to talk at all,
being socially nervous or shy,
having had bad experiences making small talk as a kid and getting excluded from groups because of it,
having said something embarrassing or awkward or rude during small talk and fearing making the same mistake again,
and so on.

There's plenty of reason to find small talk hard. That's different from claiming it to be bad except in the narrower sense of being a bad experience for you. But that's rarely how "small talk is bad" is proclaimed. Usually it's someone who wants to get out ...

Advice to My Younger Self